Tag: Kashmir

Shakespearean tragedy has a canny kinship with Kashmir

When you’ve decided to dig in, it might be advisable to ensure you don’t burrow so deep that scrambling out is no longer an option. The Jammu and Kashmir chief minister, Mehbooba Mufti, is darting, helplessly but consciously, towards making a political grave of her power dugout. Her serial capitulations to the provincial shenanigans and the national worldview of her chosen partner, the Bharatiya Janata Party, are as astonishing as they are unsurprising.

Unsurprising because a dark, and yet unstated though frightfully abject, compromise was written into her decision to fall in step with the BJP after prolonged prevarication. Astonishing because no Kashmiri chief minister in living memory has been so sublime in submitting to routine rebuff and remonstration at the hands of an ally – the kind of heckling and humiliation that cannot be going down terribly well with the constituency she so painstakingly built over the years.

The latest of many snubs that Mehbooba has taken is her government’s declaration, doubtless extracted by some backroom arm-twisting, to the Supreme Court that Major Aditya Kumar of the 10th Garhwal Rifles was not named in an FIR by her police as one of those responsible for opening fire on a mob near Shopian that resulted in the deaths of two civilians in late January. If this isn’t a patent lie, it most certainly is a deferent volte-face few will fail to notice, not least her unquiet south Kashmiri citizenry. Mehbooba’s police and her party – the Peoples Democratic Party – had openly rowed with the army over the incident; Major Kumar’s father, himself a serving army officer, had gone to the Supreme Court protesting that his son was sought to be unfairly prosecuted. But Mehbooba sounded firm about addressing the killings, “Anguished over the tragic loss of lives in Shopian,” she had tweeted soon after the incident, “… have ordered a magisterial probe into the unfortunate incident and asked the enquiry to be completed within 20 days… We will take the probe to its logical conclusion. Justice and peace are two sides of the same coin.” Her counsel’s submission to the Supreme Court on Monday – my lords we have not named a Major Aditya Kumar – clarified to us yet again that Mehbooba is allowed neither magistracy over a probe she’s ordered nor her promised logical conclusions.

Last fortnight, I spent some time in Kashmir, trying to sample opinion on the Centre’s new effort to open dialogue.

Dineshwar Sharma landed here last week as a text message. A couple of days before New Delhi’s newest emissary to Kashmir presented his person to the Valley, telephones of local notables began to simultaneously ping – mainstream and separatist politicians, opinion leaders in the media, academia and the bar, hand-picked retired civil servants, all from a list of numbers that Sharma had been handed. ‘Could we meet? Want to talk? I’m coming,’ is how Sharma was sounding out his target audience.

The response he received was, to put it mildly, lukewarm, especially insufficient in dropping early winter temperatures. Separatists rejected the overture out of hand; mainstream entities like Omar Abdullah of the National Conference showed little eagerness, settling down for a ‘private call on’ only because Sharma had gone knocking his door; among others in the intelligentsia, few obliged, opting to sense the depth and drift of Sharma’s enterprise before they revealed their minds. Those that arrived at his heavily secured VVIP perch at Hari Niwas – many dozen delegations, authentic and adulterated – had mostly been herded and nudged to Sharma’s presence by administrative fiat. On the eve of Sharma’s arrival, the office of Divisional Commissioner Basheer Khan, occupied itself shooting off directives to any outfit worth the name to present themselves to Sharma – Bakerwal and Gujjar tribesmen, boatmen, tour operators, hoteliers, motley sets of tillers, women’s and youth groups, government-funded NGOs, even a dubious crew of young journalists nobody seemed to know existed. As Sharma laboured on in his exclusive bungalow, trying to shore up respectable numbers of the interested, The Telegraph spoke to a cross-section of those not on his telephone log – young unaligned professionals who remain invested in Kashmir and count among stakeholders as any other. This is what they had to say on New Delhi’s latest venture:

Rashid Rather, Sociologist: Kashmiris love talking, we’ve been talking since 1947. The issue is what about. To me the problem here is not about how to deal with separatists, it is how Delhi has dealt with mainstream parties, right from Sheikh Abdullah to Farooq Abdullah to the present generation of leaders. They have been pressed to the wall. Delhi has failed the Kashmiri mainstream consistently, it was made to fail before the Kashmiri people to a point that it had no credibility left. From Indira Gandhi to Rajiv to P.V. Narasimha Rao to Atal Bihari Vajpayee, everybody made promises and turned on them. That is what has created the space for separatists. There were always separatist pockets here, but they were pockets. New Delhi-inspired failures of the mainstream have expanded the separatist constituency. My message to New Delhi is: don’t be bothered about separatists, look at how you have treated the mainstream, how you have manipulated and emaciated it. But they are not prepared to learn any lessons, they are going on repeating the same mistakes. They have played with the mainstream leadership. Such a record inspires no confidence in us. The new emissary has met many so-called delegations, nearly 40 in two days, but is this a railway platform? What is he trying to do meeting so many delegations in such a short time? Are we to take this seriously? It has become a joke. Please do not come to Kashmir without examining your own record, it will serve no purpose. Go back, introspect and if you realise you’ve made mistakes, a start can probably be made.

An elderly lady embraces Omar Abdullah on the campaign trail in rural Beerwah

Beerwah, Dec. 6: Out barnstorming the countryside a day after multiple terror hits to the Valley, chief minister and National Conference spearhead Omar Abdullah spelt out a blunt “no” to any post-poll deal with the BJP.

“That’s not going to happen, people can keep speculating and dreaming about it,” Omar told The Telegraph in an exclusive chat along his roadshow. He was touring his newly adopted rural constituency Beerwah, southwest of Srinagar.

It appears imminent the ongoing elections will throw up a hung Jammu and Kashmir House and there has been speculation in some circles Omar could ally with the BJP, or support its power effort from outside. Omar conceded the mandate may be fractured but said nothing will drive him to an alliance with the BJP, which is making an audacious first-time bid for power in India’s only Muslim-majority state.

The evil that men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones – Julius Caesar , William Shakespeare

Hajin (North Kashmir), Dec. 4: Where Kuka Parray is interred an argument still rings between good and evil, between what he was and he was not.

Who’d argue with a daughter whose eyes moisten when she points in the direction of Parray’s grave and lets out a sigh: ” Meray Papa… my father.”

Who’d argue with the fathers and mothers of those that Parray’s men wantonly killed – “that traitor who preyed upon his own”.

Not a blade of grass springs on Parray’s graveside, much less a blossom; and birds don’t alight to sing. For a cage it is where he lies, a padlocked enclosure of mortar and wrought iron filigree erected on his front lawn, a stained general in his cold labyrinth.

He wouldn’t be safe elsewhere in a place under open skies. He denied himself the eternal liberties the way he lived and died.

Between folk singer and folk terror, Kuka Parray became a blistered chapter in Kashmir’s contemporary tales, a chapter nobody fondly recalls but nobody would wish to forget in this neck of the woods.

Panun Kashmir protagonists Virender Raina and Ashwini Chrangoo in Jammu: “We are victims of a holocaust.”Agitated Pandit migrants at the Jagti township near Jammu: “We are actors of a forgotten tragedy.”The Telegraph report on the first wave of Kashmir migration in early 1990

Jammu, Nov. 28: Among The Telegraph’s reports on the first torrent of Pandits fleeing the Valley in 1989-90 was the story of a little girl and her grandmother.

They’d been ejected from their Habbakadal home in Srinagar and flung into the disarray of a campsite on Jammu’s outskirts. The girl played with sand in a pit, as she would do with snow; her grandmother hadn’t rid herself of a lifetime’s habit of carrying a kangri (firepot) around.

The Jammu weather didn’t warrant a firepot, so instead of embers she stored in it lozenges for her granddaughter and keys to a faraway house she’d never return to unlock. It’s likely the old lady is no more, the little girl would be a 30-something somewhere. It’s unlikely she’s home.

Kashmir’s Pandits flew frightened and far from the violent aazaadi eruption, like birds off a startled tree. In the 25 years since, they’ve gone everywhere but not back up the Banihal Pass, never to that native tree of theirs.

The horror of departure shivers Raka Khashu after all these years. “I was a schoolgirl and I heard our entire neighbourhood warning us of consequences, from the mosques, from the streets, it was horrific. And then they came home and shot my grandfather dead.”

On Tuesday, Jammu and Kashmir casts the first vote in what’s probably its most consequential election in many decades.

The house of the Abdullahs, the first family of Kashmiri politics, is palpably in decline. A new “outsider” claimant to power — Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s BJP — is in dramatic surge.

he field is abuzz. Players like Mufti Mohammed Sayeed’s PDP and Sajjad Lone’s People’s Conference too are backing themselves in what is the most open contest the state has seen.

It is an election pregnant with implications, for India and for the region. What could it mean if the
BJP were to grab controlling stakes in India’s only Muslim-majority province? How will it impact relations with Pakistan, which occupies one chunk of Kashmir and is deeply and violently enmeshed in the affairs of the part India governs?

There is another, oft ignored, facet that this election could be about, a brutally plucked piece of the riven map of J&K — this is also the 25th anniversary year of the hounding of Kashmiri Pandits from their homes, a calamitous chapter that left a populace adrift and the Valley a radically altered space.

Kashmir’s Pandits restively await the end of exile. Is this election to be the herald of that hour? A status report on India’s unspoken Partition

It was November 2, 1947; the ink on Kashmir’s accession to India was only a week old. What followed would knock the stuffing off that sublime vow and render it a tattered feast for vultures.

Banihal, Nov. 24: This is an obituary notice that has long required posting: Kashmiriyat is dead.

But never mind, nobody’s shedding tears. Not least the standard-bearers of that celebrated covenant of syncretic concord and peaceable, if not also rich and festive, cohabitation.

A quarter century after they tore ties, suture upon suture, Kashmiri Muslims and Kashmiri Pandits have heckled Kashmiriyat to gory expiry. That achieved, they have dumped its cask and stomped off opposite ways to curse the faith they once together espoused.

The few that insist Kashmiriyat is still alive are stoking wishful rumour, frosted embers at the bottom of a kangri, the signature Kashmiri hotpot. Kashmiriyat? Then you must also believe the “Happy Valley” suffix to Kashmir isn’t a cynically deluded indulgence.

Down opposite sides of the Banihal Pass, up 9,291ft in the Pir Panjal bridgehead between Jammu and Kashmir, has come to prosper a migraine aspiring to become a civil war. If there is a broken truth on earth, it lies here, it lies here, it lies here.

The mouth of the Jawahar tunnel at Banihal Pass which links Jammu to the Kashmir Valley.

The travesty is, there aren’t a more kindred people likely to be found — they come from common roots and genealogy, they kiss the same soil, eat the same food, speak the same language. But their conversation has become a grisly caterwaul ringing in the depths of the Jawahar Tunnel, a connector that has now become a divide three kilometres long.

Srinagar: The picture you see is not a still from Vishal Bhardwaj’s Haider. It could well have been.

There are countless tortured tales buried in Haider’s home landscape, only one could have been told in the course of a three-hour feature. But in its telling, the makers of Haider have artfully exhumed a bibliography of horrors that has remained proscribed, or worse, condemned to indifference and denial. The hyper-reality of Bollywood fare can often make light of gravity and fritter its essence away in bursts of hyperbole. Haider’s great virtue is that it does not succumb to the easy temptation of overstating; it is, if anything, a too delicately tempered rendition of a noir narrative. Far more unspeakable things have happened in the Kashmir than would pass muster with the censors. They defy the most dire imaginings of fiction.

This picture is from a village called Larnoo in a scenic recess of Kokernag in south Kashmir. The man in it is a father and he is praying at the freshly bedded grave of his son, Abdul Rahman. The year is 2007, and this graveside has just laid bare another of Kashmir’s grim tales.

The interred Abdul Rahman was a carpenter. He was also childhood friends with Farooq Ahmed Padder, his cousin and killer. This killer killed with licence; he was a policeman, Constable Farooq Ahmed Padder, pride of Larnoo who became its dread.

He had hulk hands, he could dig a grave with his fingers, they said, a man built like a bear. He prowled like one too, picking victims with cunning, then making swift work of slaughter. He preyed with little effort, among his own. Nazir Ahmed Deka, vendor of perfumes, was too a childhood friend and Larnoo neighbour. Ghulam Nabi Wani, the cloth hawker, was a mate from the village round the bend. So was Ali Mohammed Padder, petty government employee. Abdul Rehman, the carpenter, was the closest to him, a first cousin and the lone son of frail old parents, father of five daughters, the youngest of whom was but three months. Abdul Rahman was also worn of means and in need. He wanted a government job. He turned to Constable Farooq Padder, the village boy who had made it big. He promised to help.

He would speak to the right people and get his carpenter cousin a job, but it would cost him some. People want money, you see. Abdul Rehman borrowed and scrounged and gave the constable seventy five thousand rupees. He vanished with the money. Months went by. When Abdul Rehman pressed his cousin, he asked him to come see him in Srinagar. Abdul Rahman bussed down to make his appointment in Batmaloo, a busy Srinagar hub, but only to be bundled into an unmarked car. That night he spent in the police lockup at Ganderbal, some thirty kilometres north of Srinagar. The following night he was shoved into the back of a police van, driven into the desolate woods of Waskar and shot dead by a combined party of policemen and paramilitary jawans. So he couldn’t be identified, they ripped his face with bullets. Abdul Rahman, the carpenter of Larnoo, had become Abu Hafiz, dreaded terrorist from Multan in Pakistan. They filed an FIR of the catch and killing; a dark crime became a badge of valour. The custodians of Ganderbal Police — SSP Hans Raj Parihar, DSP Bahadur Ram, ASI Farooq Ahmed Guddoo — were rewarded for their gallantry, Rs 1,30,000 in cash.

Larnoo’s evil son earned his share of the booty for each man he supplied the brass fodder for gold and glory. Ghulam Nabi Wani, the cloth merchant, became Zulfiqar, Lashkar hitman; Nazir Ahmed Deka, the perfume seller, became Abu Zubair, Pakistani militant; Ali Mohammed Padder was dismissed without a name, just a foreign militant. And each kill put a shine on the prospects of the killers. In the noble pursuit of fighting the country’s war in Kashmir, they were lining their breasts with medals and their pockets with cash. An unrelated accident unraveled Constable Farooq’s grisly murders; he was caught operating a mobile SIM blackballed by the police. He sang long enough during interrogation to put himself in jail, along with SSP Parihar and DSP Bahadur Ram. They remain behind bars.

Constable Farooq’s story probably tells us why criminal wrongdoing has had such a successful and sustained outing in Kashmir. Here was a mere police constable but nobody in Larnoo dared take him on. How could the poor of Larnoo take on a constable? That could mean their end. He could plant a rumour about your militant connections and set the Task Force upon you. Or he could plant a gun in your backyard and summon the Army. He knew powerful people. He had teamed up with SSP Parihar, who went on patting him on the back. Great job, Padder, keep knocking them. It was good for the case diaries. It was good for SSP saheb, he stood apart with a better kill rate when he went to the monthly operational meetings at headquarters. It was good for Mother India. Constable Farooq was good for Mother India. That’s the fearsome rot Kashmir is in. That’s what Haider is able to capture and convey, often through the charming expedient of farce. What’s, after all, to separate the serial perfidy of Haider’s singing Salmans from the chutzpah of Constable Farooq? Or of the sinister deceit of Kay Kay Menon’s Khurram from the murderous career of Kuka Parray, sarkari assassin? When Parray, also elected MLA like Khurram in the rifle-butt poll of 1996, was killed, Hajin didn’t allow its native space in the communal graves; he had to be slid six feet under in his front lawn.

Haider, in many senses, is its own act of chutzpah, an audacious dive into a macabre womb to grab a plot far more complex than merely the familiar and simplistic narrative of Kashmir’s thwarted political aspiration. It is the gift of a haunted Kashmir to Kashmiris. Here, this is what was done to you, and this is what you did to yourselves. It is not content sitting this side or that; it tells you there are fences everywhere, even in beds and bedrooms. It tells you how unrelieved turbulence can twist and pervert the human condition.

Above the daily humdrum Kashmir floats a pensive, unassuaged air so insistent it makes prayer sound like a dirge. By twilight, it has risen from the houses of God and become a shroud that defies cameras as well as it defies banishment — “Hamaara aasmaan kaale parindon se ghira hua hai…Our skies are besieged by ravens…” Nobody will forget their dead, nobody will cease waiting for the vanished. What’s the count? But don’t even get there, the numbers are too high and it’s not the numbers, its people. Parents, children, siblings, spouses, buried, or worse, missing without trace. Crying resumes each evening beneath the portals of mosques and shrines and rises aloft that shroud to the skies. No place has cried so uninterrupted as Kashmir, it has cried so long crying has become its song.

That crying is Haider’s background score. And if it has fallen on deaf years in a constituency that cannot tire of decrying Vishal Bhardwaj’s third Shakespearean adaptation, if it has stroked raging arguments over right and wrong, that too must count as part of Haider’s success. Kashmir’s reality remains both divisive and divided, a place tragically broken upon itself. In a classic sequence, Tabu’s Ghazala comes to enact Haider’s — and Kashmir’s — metaphoric moment. She has stepped into the ghastly carcass of her charred bungalow, and as she finds her reflection in a framed mirror, it cracks in two and splits her up: Ghazala, half widow, half bride, grieving and guilty. That’s Kashmir, paradise and hell, nightmare and past and future dream. It’s what the pose of the man in the picture may be too: a lament, and a prayer.

Ends

PS: How the picture came about

When the cold-blooded murders of innocents ordered by the Ganderbal police brass came to light in 2007, it quickly became clear that the killer and most of his victims came from the same village in the upper reaches of Kokernag in South Kashmir: Larnoo. I happened to be in Srinagar on assignment at the time and decided to go because I heard some of the victims’ exhumed remains had been returned to their families. When I reached Larnoo, a three-hour drive from Srinagar, the cremation of carpenter Abdul Rahman Padder, had just been concluded. It was February and Larnoo lay mired in the muddy leftovers of melted snow. The entire village was gathered around the Padders’ home, shocked, silent, seething. I sat a while among the mourners, and then asked Zahoor Ahmed Padder, Abdul’s father, if I could see where they had lain his son to rest. The old man held my hand and led me to a clearing in the woods on the verge of the village and point to an oblong mound of earth. It had been raining, and so to protect Abdul’s final place of rest villagers had covered it will bales of hay. Zahoor fell upon his knees and began to pray, and that is how this picture came to be taken.